“We’ve been told to go, but we’ve got two more cells of lightning that need to move through here before we start to pump,” Jim Lloyd, the corps’ operations team leader, said as he walked through the wind and rain late Sunday afternoon. “We’re going to work through the night to get this loaded.”
Mr. Lloyd, who had just left a briefing, emphasized that although Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, who commands the Mississippi Valley Division of the corps, had ordered that the explosives be loaded, he had yet to give the final word to blast the levee.
“He’ll still have to make the decision,” Mr. Lloyd said, adding that although the explosives were extremely stable and would not be primed, the lightning was “going to complicate our lives something fierce.”
Earlier in the day, Missouri officials made a last-ditch effort to spare the levee when the state’s attorney general turned to the United States Supreme Court, asking it to overturn a day-old order from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit that had allowed the corps to proceed with the operation. The state was later denied.
But even as the legal fight played out, General Walsh was directing the two barges stationed at a nearby staging area to prepare to move into the final position from which crews could begin injecting the levees with 265 tons of explosives to blast the earthen structure.
“It will be a heaving of soil — the levee will be excavated very rapidly,” said Nick Boone, a mechanical engineer who leads the corps’ blasting team. “On this upper end, it’s going to look like a waterfall. It’s an instant removal, and that’s the whole point — instant relief of the entire system.”
Blowing the levee will serve as a fiery coda to an agonizing round of deliberations that has played out here over the past several days, as General Walsh has weighed the interests of about 200 people living in the floodway against the safety of Cairo, Ill., a struggling town of around 3,000 people that lies on a winnowed slip of land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The move is expected to drop water levels upstream by roughly four feet.
General Walsh has toured the affected region over the past several days, meeting with residents and studying data provided by his team of experts. All the while, the surging rivers have continued to rise.
“?‘Project Flood’ is upon us,” he said in a statement on Sunday. “It is testing the system like never before.”
The problem is essentially one of drainage. With both rivers running high, they have backed up above the confluence, raising water levels upstream and causing major underseepage in Cairo, weakening the town’s defenses and prompting city officials there to call for a mandatory evacuation.
“It’s a no-brainer, the ground’s softening,” said Mayor Judson Childs of Cairo, who on Monday leaves office to be replaced by a new mayor. “This could change from minute to minute.”
On Sunday, Illinois state troopers went door to door rousting residents and patrolling the empty streets. A crew of inmates from the Tamms Correctional Center continued to fill sandbags at the north end of town, and emergency vehicles raced along Washington Avenue. Otherwise, the streets were largely empty as residents appeared to heed the evacuation order, fleeing town in a diminishing stream of cars.
Pulling his truck onto Washington Avenue, Harry Williams said he had evacuated last night but returned to get some medicine for his father-in-law and check on his property.
“I was worried about looters,” said Mr. Williams, who is staying with family north of town. “But it looks like they’re patrolling the town a lot better now.”
A few blocks down the road, Sebastian Thomas, lounging in a plastic lawn chair outside a self-service car wash, said the only thing that would make him evacuate was “about six feet of water.”
A. G. Sulzberger contributed reporting.
没有评论:
发表评论